On December 13, 2013, New York’s own MGMT played Barclays Center in Brooklyn, thus making it MGMT’s biggest NY show to date. Here are 10 observations from my experience at the show.

1. Every hipster in New York was at the MGMT show.

2. After seeing MGMT in small venues (Mercury Lounge), medium sized venues (Webster Hall), festivals (All Points West), large venues (Radio City Music Hall), and museums (Guggenheim), their best show to date was the arena (Barclays) show where they were able to show off extremely cool visuals and they let the music do the talking. Though being a “hipster who jumped the shark” type band, their songwriting is really excellent.

3. During their epic 12 minute song “Siberian Breaks,” which features many changes, the audience had no idea it was the same song and applauded thunderously as each change happened.

4. MGMT smartly paced out their 3 major “hits” (‘Time to Pretend,’ ‘Electric Feel’ and ‘Kids’) and after “Kids” was played at least 1/2 of Barclays Center made a mass exodus for the door, despite there being several songs to go.

5. Even though they played 5 songs from their disappointingly horrible new album, they were peppered in between their more “catchy” and “linear” songs off their first two albums, therefore not derailing the momentum of the show too badly.

MGMT

6. Although the setlist was 16 songs long, favorites such as “The Handshake,” “Brian Eno,” “Astro-Mancy,” “Destrokk” and “Future Reflections” were omitted.

7. Nearly everyone around where I sat took selfies for the duration of the show.

8. The “cheap seats” section was closed thus messing with the acoustics of the arena and the sound was pretty bad, whereby it was very echo-y and it was very hard to make out the lyrics.

9. A gigantic cowbell was played during “Your Life Is A Lie,” and when Gibby Haynes from Butthole Surfers (who was a special guest that came out to play the dreaded instrument) missed his cues, you could still hear the sound of the cowbell thus potentially arousing a “Cowbell Lipsync” scandal.

10. MGMT at BRCLYS were AWSM and a video of “Congratulations” will be coming soon!

I have to disagree about the sound. While the sound for Dinosaur JR and Kuroma was not too good, it was very good for MGMT. I was sitting in the 4th row almost directly beind the soundboard, and it was fine.

Obviously I don’t know where you sat, but when I buy concert tickets I like to sit as close to dead center as possible. The sound is the best there, and I’m at the show to hear music.

Cate said,

I disagree about their new album. It’s not easy listening, but if you give it a chance, it’s a fun, interesting album. The crowd obviously wasn’t familiar with the new songs that they played, but Mystery Disease and Cool Song No. 2 came off very well in the arena.

And yeah, sound was totally fine for a few rows back in one of the front side sections.